The Image Bears Witness to Your State: Gifts for our World from the Sufi Tradition

A lecture by Sir Nicholas Pearson for the Temenos Academy given on Wednesday 9th July 2025 at the Art Workers' Guild, London. This lecture will explore the origin, nature and significance of the image in the light of the wisdom of some of the great visionary teachers of Islam. Drawing upon the insights of the 10th-century physician and philosopher Avicenna and the Sufi mystic ‘Ibn Arabi, as well as their later interpretation by Inayat Khan and Henry Corbin, Nicholas Pearson will relate how the understanding of the image offered by these thinkers has profoundly affected his approach to ‘the learning of the imagination’ as a working psychotherapist. After charting the degradation of the image and the imagination in the West, this talk will explore how we might find a path out of our current secular malaise. Furthermore, it will suggest that a recovery of a spiritual orientation might be found through a true understanding of the nature of Soul and the images that circle around that reality. Citing examples from his own practice in working with autoimmune dis-ease, this lecture will show how the direct experience of the image, and the powers it contains, can be found through careful attention to our own body and mind. SIR NICHOLAS PEARSON was born in India in 1943 and spent his first half-century in the Army, in politics and in international business. This period ended for him abruptly in a catastrophic car crash which ushered in a total re-orientation of his life. Eventually training as a counsellor aged 60, he explored the nature and creative power of working with the imagination in mental and physical disorders. His work is increasingly orientated to working with the roots of autoimmune disorders, through the images carried by a creative imagination. He is a Fellow of the Academy, having served as its chairman for twelve years, and runs a busy psychotherapeutic practice from Kensington where he lives with his wife. *Please note that due to technical difficulties on the night, the final part of the talk was re-filmed Image credit for thumbnail - detail from royal manuscript of 'Conference of the Birds', Isfahan, Iran; illustration added by Habibullah of Mashad, c. 1600. Copyright, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.